Legal Experience
My legal career has been varied and intense. It all began at Stanford Law School back in 1978, where I started my career as one of the youngest students in the law school. During the summers I took associate positions with large firms in Los Angeles and Chicago, providing support for large complex civil litigation. While working in this area, I focused on everything from international commodities transactions (I was personally handled a major silver purchase well known international clients) to hostile acquisitions and corporate mergers. I learned a lot in those experiences, and decided to give it a go in Seattle after graduation, where I worked as an associate handling general civil litigation. However, I soon learned that I hungered for the courtroom, so I took a job in London, England, where I worked in world class venues like the Old Bailey, the virtual cradle where our legal system was born.
It was a phenomenal experience and solidified my desire for trial work. Returning to Seattle I began work as a public defender with Associated Counsel for the Accused (ACA), where I rose to the rank of felony attorney. While at ACA I was chair of the Training Committee, which is an extremely significant fact, considering that it is how I met my wife of 22 years, Mimi Buescher. Mimi and I left our jobs in Seattle to venture out to Saipan where I was the Chief of the Criminal Division for the CNMI Attorney General's Office. I managed the Criminal Division Office, handling an extremely large and varied volume of criminal prosecutions, including: the successful prosecution of several very high ranking government officials for fraud, embezzlement and corruption; major drug sting operations, including a twenty pound seizure of heroin in the wheel well of a major commercial jet liner; the detection and removal of a major international Yakuza embezzlement and money laundering scheme; and numerous murders, rapes, and other major crimes. This job was critical to my development as an attorney because it taught me intimately about prosecution work and gave me an appreciation for the preparation of warrants, emergency responses to crime scenes, and a wealth of other experience that could only be obtained while helping an emerging national legal system to follow the Rule of Law while maintaining public order.
In this capacity I taught Constitutional Law at the Police Academy, where I gained notoriety as a faculty member by failing an entire class of candidates one year on search and seizure. (They later thanked me.) I was also responsible for the legal affairs of several related agencies, including the Police Department and the Alcohol Control Bureau. After Saipan, Mimi and I moved to Whidbey Island, where my wife's brother was a flight instructor. We started the first ever Island County Public Defender's Office, earning a national reputation for demonstrating sophisticated legal skills and developing educational programs, and eventually evolved into the full service law firm we are today, Platt and Buescher, Attorneys at Law. At the present time my firm handles all manner of civil cases while I focus on major criminal representation. My extensive trial experience and involvement with training and legal education make me a perfect match for Superior Court Judge, where my ability to understand the minutiae of legal procedure and trial practice will be invaluable.